Going With My Gut

Lobster Pot Popup by Nicos Popupalot

Above: Chef Nicos, who wouldn't smile out of respect for the lobster about to meet its saffron brothed end.

 

Lobsters, my brother says, tell horror stories about The Kraken to baby lobsters, to make them behave. "The Kraken searches out, destroys, consumes the biggest, the gnarliest, the meanest among us", Mama and Papa lobsters bubble, with waving antennas and clacking claws. "Entire lobster armies, battlescars and all, get decimated. Ground to umami dust. Just think what The Kraken would do to you. The Kraken would have you for breakfast. Literally."

"In Lobster World," my brother tells me, "You are the Kraken".

So when Chef Nicos invited me to attend his Lobster Pot popup at The Arch Gallery in Cambridge Heath (9-11 May 2013) as a media guest, I probably said yes much more quickly than is cool. And there was much wailing and gnashing of teeth among Canadian lobsters - the lobsters of choice for his seafood menu.

Chef Nicos grew up in restaurants. His Greek Cypriot parents ran one until late last year, which has nudged Nicos to want to carry on the family legacy to start his own restauarnt, sometime, somewhere. In the meantime he cooks at Junction Tavern, and Angels and Gypsies in Camberwell. And hosts popups to try out different food formats and locations. His last one, also at The Arch Gallery, featured comfort food pie mash and gravy.

 

 

The Arch Gallery is a beautifully refitted railway arch in Cambridge Heath. What used to be a long stretch of car mechanics now hosts a varied mix of furniture and bike stores, real estate agents, and now, a flexible arts / events space.

 

 

I can't remember the last time I had a live piano man carress the keys over dinner. Fancy! With a gas-cannister-powered open flame heature right next to him. Edgy!

 

 

For starters, Rubenesque Colchester rock oysters. Mr Edible is nervous about me eating raw shellfish, as we're expecting Baby Edible #2 in August. I sulk when I'm told I'm allowed only one.

"Which one is least likely to get you into trouble?" he asks.

"The biggest one," I snap, and snatch before he can say much more.

I eat mine completely plain these days, and the fattest oyster on the platter was sweet and creamy, with none of the metallic tang that sometimes comes with their more anorexic looking relatives. Mr Edible tells me the shallot vinegar "didn't taste commercial" - a compliment.

 

 

And now to the main event. A lobster bucket for 2. We wonder if it will come with 2 lobsters, or 2-person sized lobster. (The Kraken declares there is no such thing as a 2-person sized lobster.) In any case, this bucket came with 1 lobster to share.

 

 

The booty at the bottom of the bucket: A generous portion of baby prawns, razor clams, clams, mussels, and samphire, swishing in a very pleasantly spiced saffron broth. With celery, carrot and onion for sweetness, and some pepper and lemongrass for kick, Chef Nicos tells me.

 

 

Afterwards I wander back out towards the entrance of the gallery, where the open kitchen -- not just to all punters walking in, but also in full view of the street as it's right next to the full height windows of the arch -- is positioned, and spy on the action at the pass. The pop up menu choices also included Devon crab claws, and giant tiger prawns. When I saw this fresh portion of prawns coming out for service, it was possibly the first time in my life I wondered if I should have asked for something else instead of the lobster.

Briefly, anyway.

 

 

In addition to cooking, Chef Nicos tells me that his other passion in life is drumming. There's something about this setup of pots and lids and the way Nicos whizzes his way around them that captures both for me.

 

 

So what next? Watch out for something in Camden, Nicos says. And his hometurf, Camberwell, where he wants to dig deep into his roots. "I want to do My Big Fat Greek PopUp," he says. Kali Orexi!

 

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Edible Experiences, and attended this event as a guest.

Click on the logo below to view upcoming events by Nicos Popupalot.

Chef Vivek Singh, on Darjeeling Express Popping Up at The Cinnamon Club

Above: The glowing Asma Khan of Darjeeling Express Indian supperclub.

 

Let's face it. The more prestigious the restaurant, the more likely the head honcho chef is to have a reputation for being protective of their turf.

So much so that Chef Vivek Singh opened the doors to the hallowed halls of The Cinnamon Club - one of the big league fine dining Indian restaurants in London - for Asma Khan of Darjeeling Express Indian supperclub to host a pop up lunch banquet, restaurant guide stalwart Square Meal sat up and took notice, pinning it on their calendar of upcoming events.

Even Asma herself was taken aback when she first shared the news with me a couple of months back: "I'm an untrained chef and a woman! Their kitchen have never let in either before!"

So what made Chef Vivek do it?

 

Above: From left, Chef Vivek Singh of The Cinnamon Club, Kalyan Karmakar of Finely Chopped and me spend a delicious afternoon swapping stories about authenticity, Indian-Chinese food and competition among restaurants and bloggers at the Darjeeling Express Cinnamon Club popup. Photo courtesy of Ming Tang-Evans.

 

Asma's fabulous cooking, certainly. When the Darjeeling Express pop up came to pass at The Cinnamon Club this past weekend, Chef Vivek made our table get up and ladle our biriyani onto our plates ourselves, rather than passing the giant platter around. "Because this biriyani deserves a standing ovation!" he declared!

Asma's colourful family history, perhaps? Asma doesn't talk about it much, but she is actually a member of old Mughal royalty. But a penniless princess, she shrugged to me over a cup of chai when she first shared with me the news about The Cinnamon Club, with not even enough money to upkeep a token crumbling family palace in India. Her grandfather gave away all the family lands when India gained Independence, she says, with glowing pride rather than bitterness.

Chef Vivek's own enlightened attitude to perceived competition, partly. "The stage is big enough for all of us," he says, hinting at collaborative events to come.

"Here's the real hook for me", Chef Vivek confides as he leans over his chicken kebabs and momos this past Saturday (27 Apr 2013) at the popup, "All my life, I've met so many women who tell me they are tied down by food. They do a hundred and one different things not food related, to liberate themselves from food."

"Then here's Asma. A woman who is highly educated academic lawyer. A mother, whom, now that her children are old enough, is liberating herself through food! I find that utterly fascinating."

Could this it be the start of an edible liberation movement within ethnic minority communities? At the Darjeeling Express popup I also have the pleasure of meeting the irrepressible Iqbal Wahab (below), the original founder of The Cinnamon Club, and now CEO of Roast Restaurant at Borough Market. He and Sahara Quli (2 seats to his right) are involved in a new programme to train up ethnic minority women (and a few men) to leverage their (hidden, possible under-appreciated) home cooking expertise to make a living outside of the home.

 

 

All exciting food for thought, possibly the best pairing of all to Asma's beautiful cooking that just kept on coming that afternoon. The full menu below.

Delightful collaborations included:

A curated tea flight by British tea boutique Lalani & Co, featuring exquisite small batch leaves from the Darjeeling region.

Green Saffron Rice's aged basmati for Asma's biriyani. Salted and stored in between leaves, the rice dehydrates, strengthening its grain structure and concentrating its flavour.

Cocoa Hernandos' addictive masala chai-infused chocolate buttons.

Duke of Delhi's spicy ginger cookie in a take-home goodie bag.

 

Above: I couldn't resist featuring the gorgeous Shu of Mummy I Can Cook twice in the collage above. She could definitely pass for a pretty girl from Darjeeling, so close to the Chinese border!

 

The menu:

Canapes

*Potato and Peas Samosas
*Chicken Seekh Kabab
*Salmon and Dill Fish Cakes

Starters

*Black Tail Tiger Prawn in a Glass
*Okra Boats (Vegetarian)

*Steamed Nepali Momo with Green Himalayan Chutney
* Vegetable Momo (Vegetarian)

*Papri Chaat (potato and chickpea with tangy tamarind chutney)

*Tengri (chicken) Kabab
* Baigan Bhajja- Aubergine Pakora (Vegetarian)

Mains

*Sirka gosht (Slowcooked lamb with Calcutta's signature vinegar)
* Bengali Niramish (Dry-fried mix vegetable fish, lightly spcied and sprinkled with lemon juice)

*Chicken Chaap
*Channa (chickpea) Dal (Vegetarian)

*Bengali Fish Malai Curry
* Paneer Malai Curry (Vegetarian)

*Aloo Dam

*Paratha

The Rice Finale

*Calcutta Mutton Biryani
*Vegetable Pallau (Vegetarian)

*Cucumber Raita
*Darjeeling Express’s signature tomato, apricot and prune chutney

Dessert

*Bhappa Doi
Steamed Bengali yogurt (described by a guest as what a chai latte pudding would taste like!)

*Fruit Chaat
Selection of fruits marinated in Himalayan rock salt, lime juice and brown sugar

 

Want to get on board the Darjeeling Express? Asma's next event is a Gymkhana tea party on Sat 18 May 2013. Taste for yourself what happens when Indian and Pakistani high society mingle with English Colonials!

 

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Edible Experiences, and provide ticketing and marketing services for Darjeeling Express. I attended the Darjeeling Express - Cinnamon Club popup as an invited guest.

London Supperclub: Dining on the Darjeeling Express

Above: Chef Asma of Darjeeling Express whirring in action.

 

Chef Asma Khan of Darjeeling Express Indian supperclub is runaway train of deliciousness, and I consider myself very lucky to be part of her exciting edible journey.

When the law PhD graduate is not running her free legal clinic for women, or raising funds for new infrastructure for her childrens' school, or volunteering with with food charities (to the point of fighting their parking tickets incurred while making crucial deliveries, goes one story), she's feeding supperclub guests -- sometimes 30 to 55 at a time -- some of the finest Indian food I've tasted this side of the Bay of Bengal.

Quite a feat for someone who learned how to cook only after she got married. Her kitchen mentor, she told me, is an old blind chef back home in India. Who taught her how to cook recipes which have been in her family for 4 generations with all of her senses.

The result? Have a look at some of her starters, for starters.

Haleem: a traditional Hyderabadi pounded wheat porridge, slow-cooked with shredded mutton and spices, lifted and lightened by a sprinkle of coriander and a squeeze of lime. Its hefty comfort-food appeal makes it a popular dish at break-fast time during the Muslim fasting month of Ramadan. I think of haleem as baby food, if your baby is a sumo wrestler.

 

 

Calcutta-style chicken kaati rolls and momos (Tibetan dumplings). One day, if we're very lucky, we will see a Darjeeling Express food truck selling these kaati rolls for lunch. A girl can hope!

 

 

Expertly fried chicken and samosa and tangy tamarindy potato, a popular street snack in many Indian cities.

 

 

I struggle to photograph curries well. So these photos here really don't do justice to Darjeeling Express's Bengali fish malai curry (left) and prawn curry. And even if I did, how would one capture the spice-mix profile of the curry, so much deeper, more subtle, more complex than your neighbourhood Balti house?

 

 

I also realised after 2 Darjeeling Express events that I have consistently failed to photograph Asma's lamb dishes (evidence below). It's only when I get down to the lovely bones that I smack my forehead and reach for the camera. I blame Asma's blind mentor, who went as far as to hold Asma's hand and teach her how to read the weight and balance of a ladle when lifting slow cooked lamb out of a pot, so that the tender meat doesn't flake and fall off off before it reaches the serving platter.

That's why other cooks' lamb dishes are not as tender, Asma tells me. They fear the pre-platter disintegration and so they don't cook it as long. I suppose the unintended effect is pre-camera inhalation!

 

While Asma demonstrates her culinary prowess with her meat dishes, to me she demonstrates her bigness of heart with her vegetarian dishes. At my debut Darjeeling Express event this past summer I sat next to a vegetarian, who was presented with this special platter below. She was taken aback by the generous spread, and said to Asma "Oh gosh you didn't have to do this, I would have been ok to just eat more of the vegetable dishes already on your menu."

To which Asma replied, "Nonsense, my dear. Our cuisine is so deep, so wide, so varied. Of course we can take care of you."

I didn't have to taste her vegetables to be impressed.

 

 

That said, her paneer with cashews was pretty kickass.

 

 

As is her tender and gently spiced cauliflower. I have deep admiration for anyone who can make cauliflower interesting without adding the obvious and overdone cheese-and-bacon combination to it.

 

 

Many Indian desserts are some rendition of milk-and-so-much-sugar-it-hurts-my-teeth. So I really enjoy Darjeeling Express's fruit chaat - a very lively light fruit salad laced with jaggery (raw brown sugar) and tamarind. Perfect after a typical Darjeeling Express avalanche of rice, breads and proteins.

 

 

After a very successful summer debut at The Supperclub Summit at London's Goethe Institut and our very own Sunday Feasts series, Darjeeling Express is upping the ante this winter. Friends and fans of Asma's food are rallying around her to dream up and execute new exciting events, like Indian food and wine pairing events, and Indian food-themed walking tours followed by a soul-warming supper.

So come aboard the Darjeeling Express, and discover a few new spice routes right here in London.

 

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Edible Experiences, and provide event ticketing services for Darjeeling Express. I've attended 1 Darjeeling Express event as Asma's guest and another as a paying guest.

Click on the logo below to view upcoming events for Darjeeling Express.

Flavours of Spain Supperclub

Above: Ana (left) and Teresa of Flavours of Spain supperclub, talking their guests through their cheese and charcuterie platter.

 

Ana and Teresa run Flavours of Spain, an independent outfit that import fabulous goodies from Spain, with a special focus on Ana's native Galicia - a region on the country's north west coast, famous for its seafood. I first met them at The Stock Mkt on Bermondsey Square this past summer, and have been a regular buyer (it sound better than "addict") of their manchego cheese and quince paste since.

This past July the 2 lovely ladies decided to start a supperclub to showcase their products and Ana's family recipes. Ana grew up around cooks and farmers, she told me in the kitchen. But somehow she found herself working in a telecommunications company for a number of years, before she made the leap and embraced her true passion - food. Ah well, it was the same with Pedro Almodovar and film, I shrug and smile. And aren't we glad he made the leap.

Ana and Teresa very generously had me along as a guest at their supperclub debut. Here, finally, is my long overdue writeup!

We open the summery evening with delicious strawberry mojitos.

 

 

Next, an elegant platter of what you might find at their weekly market stalls - a mixture of cheeses, charcuterie and olives. The little cubes on the middle right are cave-matured Cabrales, a Spanish blue cheese. "Probably Spain's strongest cheese," the ladies said on their little cheeseboard. They weren't kidding. I'll stick with their manchego.

 

 

An absolutely delightful take on gazpacho. That gorgeous hue and hit of sweetness comes from a special secret ingredient - cherries!

 

 

Tortilla - the classic Spanish omelette with potatoes. Personally I'm convinced you have to be Spanish to make a proper tortilla. That is, not have it fall apart into a sorry broken heap just as it transits from pan to plate. (Sigh of shame). Here, Flavours of Spain cleverly cut the tortilla up into tasting cubes, so that you can pace yourself. Because look what comes next...

 

 

Chorizo cooked in Galician Mencia wine. A perfect pairing with the tortilla above.

 

 

Squid in ink, serived with bomba rice from Spain's only existing wooden mill (perhaps Mr Quixote did manage to get all the others). I love squid in its own ink. I could stand to eat about a cauldron full of this.

 

 

Except there was one more hefty dish to go before dessert. A stew of oxtail with pochas beans from Rioja. *Mops sweat from brow*. I look forward to making pots of this in the coming chilly months.

 

 

And now to dessert: A coconut flan, a dessert made primarily of eggs and sugar. Combined with coconut, this is basically what kaya (South East Asian egg and coconut jam) would taste like, much to my delight. At some point I'll need to introduce Ana and Teresa to kaya toast.

Sidenote: At their stall at Brockley Market yesterday I discovered their fuet, little sweet-salty sausages that Ana apparently calls "candy meat" because of the way she snacks on them in front of the TV. I sheepishly confess that I cleaned them out of their last 320g of the stuff at the end of the market day. My excuse was that I was taking them to a party. Except there was already so much food at the party that I thought "Ah well, no sense wasting them here, I'm taking these babies home!" And so here I sit, snacking on candy meat. Promising myself that since they do resemble Chinese wax sausages in flavour, I should really see how they perform as a Chinese-sausage substitute in say, claypot rice. I wonder what other unexpected Spanish products could be used in Asian dishes... any thoughts, readers?

Back on plot: We also had a lemon tart that got consumed before I could get a photo of it!

 

 

A wonderful hearty dinner indeed. Perhaps a wee bit too heavy in total for a warm summer evening, but the mains would all be excellent comfort food in the months now coming. Muchas gracias to Ana and Teresa for having me along.

 

Above: I often picture Ana as a main character in an Almodovar movie. I really hope she takes this as a compliment.

 

Flavour's of Spain's next supper will be on 14 October, as part of Edible Experiences' Sunday Feast series in Covent Garden. The chorizo and flan will make an apperance again (Hurrah!), as will the squid in ink but served differently. They will also be serving one of my favourite Spanish dishes ever - Pulpo ala Gallega. Galician-style Octopus. Gotta get my grubby tentacles some o that!

 

Disclosure: I attended the supperclub above as a guest. I'm the founder of Edible Experiences, and manage supperclub bookings for Sunday Feasts on behalf of Flavours of Spain.

Click on the logo below to see and book upcoming events for Flavours of Spain.

Come Join Us for a Sunday Feast

Above: Poster design by Shuhan Lee of Mummy I Can Cook

Ah Sundays. Where I grew up, Sundays were the days to have long leisurely meals with family and friends. To forget weekday foods and their sterile plasticky sheen of convenience and expediency. To instead remember more labour and love-intensive dishes. To distribute such labours of love and culinary obsession onto plates lining a long table. To share stories from the week just passed. To laugh, nod, tut at those stories, and recharge body and soul alike for the week looming ahead.

It warmed my heart to meet in London a whole community of supperclub hosts who instantly recognised that Sunday phenomenon when I described it to them, who so enthusiastically said YES when I shared with them my vision of creating and sharing that kind of Sunday Feast here in London.

 

Heck, I'll let them speak for themselves here:

SUNDAY FEASTS 2012 from Fabio Forin on Vimeo.

Video by Fabio Forin of the Backdoor Kitchen Supperclub

 

Our troupe of multi-ethnic multi-national feeders found a Sunday kitchen and dining room at the brand new School of Wok cooking school in Covent Garden, stitched together 11 elaborate Sunday menus over 3 months, and TADAH! Sunday Feasts was born.

Below is a teaser of the dishes from the various Sunday Feasts menus, served up as canapes at our press preview event on 28 Aug:

Photo credits: Fabio Forin, Cherry Smart, Jason Ng

 

1st row from left:

• Soy dashi eggs with salmon roe, and Cantonese "mouthwatering" chicken by FedbyTang
• Prawn malai curry shots and samosas with Himalayan chutney by Darjeeling Express

2nd row from left:

• Sago gula melaka by Budaya Kusina
• Our Sunday Feasts home School of Wok in Covent Garden
• Peruvian potato cakes with cheese sauce by FabCooking

3rd row from left:

• Squid and squid ink pastries, garnished with olive oil caviar and marcona almond sprinkles by Flavours of Spain
• A pop up canape-matched wine tasting by our press preview supporters A Grape Night In
• Pork belly satay and chwee kueh (steamed rice cakes with pickled turnip) by Plusixfive

4th row from left:

• Canape-style lasagne with radicchio by the Backdoor Kitchen;
• Poudine Mas (Mauritian polenta cakes with coconut) by Yummy Choo
• Surprise-flavour French crepes by Pauline Cuisine and Carib Gourmet

Come! Be tempted by our Sunday Feasts menus. Slow down, sit down, eat with some old friends, make some new friends. Fill your tummy and your soul.

Start your week right. Come feast with us. You bring drinks and an open heart. We'll bring the rest.

All Sunday Feasts are £36 + £3.60 booking fee. BYOB.

 

BOOK YOUR SUNDAY FEAST SEATS HERE.

FoodCycle's Forgotten Feast

Above: Doing good with food can be sweet.

 

For a long time now I've had a suspicion that people go hungry not so much because there's not enough food to go around. That's just the schtick pitched by big industrial companies trying to sell you chemical fertilisers and genetically modified seeds.

Rather, a significant chunk of the hunger problem is due to access to food being ALL kinds of messed up. Which must be the case if food retailers throw out millions of tons of edible food every year due to supply overstock, while entire communities are starving.

Enter FoodCycle. The charity collects perfectly edible surplus food that would otherwise be chucked by retailers (e.g. "ugly" looking vegetables), converts them into delicious and nutritious meals, then distributes those meals to socially marginalised groups such as refugees, the elderly and the working poor.

This pragmatic ethos and approach struck a chord with me, so last night we popped along to the opening night of Food Cycle's Forgotten Feast fundraiser, cheffed by eco-chef Tom Hunt, who had to improvise a menu based on otherwised dumped and foraged donations.

 

Above: Eco chef Tom Hunt talks us through the menu for Food Cycle's Forgotten Feast

 

It did mean that what eventually got served was significantly different from the menu publicised, but the meal was delicious nonetheless. (Admittedly I was relieved that sea urchin salad dressing didn't make it to the table in the end.) Bonus: Our dinner-companions-by-luck were a warm sparkling group of food journalists from Hong Kong and charity workers.

The event at Fleet River Bakery in Holborn opened with "ugly" vegetable crudities with a delicious beetroot dip. One to keep in mind for my next party.

To start, little bits of grilled pitta bread with a red-pepper-based baba ghanoush. Pleasant enough, but not particularly impactful.

 

 

A salad of foraged seaside leaves, and mackeral left over from a previous catering event that had been pickled. Delicious!

 

 

Dinner mains were served on family-style sharing platters. Always a great way to break the ice at the table.

The highlight of the evening was me was Tom's pig head porchetta, made from deconstructing, then ghetto sous-vide-ing, a dozen pig heads. A gruesome process with a deliciously gelatinous work of gourmet art as the result. Kudos!

 

 

The motherload of porchetta.

 

 

The other "protein" main was salted pollock (a great sustainable fish currently teeming in Cornwall it seems) baked with rock samphire, a leafier variation to the more twiggy marsh samphire.

 

 

Personally I felt the pollock was over salted - perhaps it doesn't stand up to the salting process the way that the much more muscular cod does. Best to have some bread and vegetables on hand.

Speaking of which, vegetables sadly tend be a much neglected afterthought when eating out. So I really enjoyed the abundance of vibrantly fresh vegetables at this dinner.

Maybe these tomatoes were too irregularly shaped for some supermarket shelf but look at how gorgeous they are on a plate simply garnished with pesto!

 

 

Grilled peppers, courgettes and carrots. Love the riot of colour and the sweet crispy burnt tips of the carrots.

 

And to finish, a lovely chocolate tart with a stew of summer fruits and a dollop of cream.

 

 

Overall, a wholesome and heartwarming way to spend £32 and an evening. Do some good with food!

This event runs till Sunday 24 June 2012. A few seats are still available here.

 

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Edible Experiences, and am helping to sell tickets for The Forgotten Feast. I attended this event as a paying customer.

New Delhi's Bukhara Pops Up in London

Above: Bukhara's Chef Manjit Gill

 

When it became apparent that I was attending the media lunch at Bukhara's London pop up last week, I received a whirlwind of wistful sighs from foodies on Twitter. "The dal! The dal!" they hollered. I could picture their eyes rolling into the back of their heads, giddy with epicurean nostalgia for the 35-year-old New Delhi landmark tandoor restaurant.

I admit, it was a bit lost on me. The only time I've been in New Delhi we were backpacking, and I was running around the old city grazing local streetfood, rolling the dice with Delhi Belly (we evaded snake eyes, somehow).

So it was quite the treat to get a glimpse into this edible hallmark of Indian high society dining via its temporary London satellite.

On the 1st floor banquet room balcony of London's Sheraton Tower in swanky Knightsbridge, Bukhara's pop up's creative director Waris Ahluwalia set up a tented garden-bar, complete with a budding jasmine bush.

 

 

The far corner of the tent had a cosy low-seating lounge, its appropriate use demonstrated by my lovely lunch companions Selina of Yummy Choo (left) and Sabrina of Sabrina's Kitchen.

 

 

 

After the champagnes were sipped, we were ushered inside and told that the meal would be served in the traditional way -- family style and without utensils.

For those game enough to eat with our hands, we were given giant apron / bibs with a plaid pattern reminiscent of Indian-uncle sarongs. Thanks for modeling the bib Sabrina!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

First up: a traditional starter of papadums with (from top, clockwise) thinly sliced raw onion, raita (yoghurt with diced onion, tomato and cucumber) and mint chutney. A small detail, but raita yoghurts are usually quite thin and drippy. I quite enjoyed Bukhara's thick yoghurt raita, which sticks more easily to the papadum.

 

 

And then the tandoor treats began. I know it all looks a bit beige below, but these were quite possibly the most succulent tandoori prawns and chicken kebabs I'd ever tasted. Chicken is usually fairly tasteless and overcooked to death in most restaurants, but here the goujons were juicy and very deeply flavoured (a multi-day marinade that involves yoghurt and lemon juice I'm guessing.)

It made such an impression that I leaned over to the veteran print food journalist seated next to me and said, "It doesn't look like much, but make sure you try the chicken." She thanked me later, and asked our waiter for seconds!

 

 

On the right, fall-apart lamb leg, and potato hash pockets. Nice enough, but eclipsed by the chicken and prawns, really.

 

 

The veggie dishes: Paneer (Indian cheese) and roasted stuffed green peppers. Again, paneer in less able hands tends to end up having the personality of styrofoam. These cubes were big, bold, bitey and springy.

Somehow in the process of trying to get a few good pictures I missed out on actually securing myself a stuffed pepper. Snooze I lose I guess!

 

 

And now, the unlikely marquee-name dish for a tandoor restaurant. Dal Bukhara - black lentils, tomatoes, ginger and garlic slowcooked for 18 hours.

That dollop of butter right at the end might have something to do with the dal's gorgeous velvety-ness...

 

 

What a dilemma! Does one eat it straight up like a soup? (Yes.) Or slather all over Bukhara's array of freshly made naans? (Yes.)

 

 

Luckily we were given the option to have seconds. AND a supermarket-style ready-meal pack to take home with us.

 

 

A Mumbai-native dining companion told me that whenever she goes home to India, she comes back with cartons upon cartons of these Bukhara dal packets. I am now considering making a call to friends in New Delhi...

 

A dessert duo: Gulab jamun below, and a rose-fragranced broken rice pudding above. I tend to struggle with the over-sweetness of Indian desserts. So I had a taste of each before settling down to a cup of hot mint tea.

 

 

There was some debate after lunch about whether one would pay the retail pop up rate of £59 for the vegetarian meal or £79 for the meat and seafood meal if left to our own devices. No doubt, even though there was no fancy plating, the attention to quality of ingredients and detail of technique for this meal was subtly but in clearly a different league from your usual curry night out. Ultimately I wouldn't, though that's mostly because we're currently living on a full-time startup budget.

But as the Bukhara pop-up's sold-out status suggests, there are plenty of people who will. Some of them are probably the same punters who are happy to shell out £250 to have The French Laundry's Thomas Keller or £195 for noma's Rene Redzepi fly into town (Noooooo I'm not shriveling up with envy...)

Many others are proof that edible nostalgia is a hot commodity in this city.

 

Bukhara's London pop up at runs until 1 June. Online bookings are sold out, but...

Tip 1: I've been told it's worth calling +44 20 8045 0715 and following @buhkaralondon to check for updates on released 2nd seatings.
Tip 2: Check also about slots for Chef Manjit's not-widely publicised cooking class.
Tip 3: For those of your with gardens and tandoori fantasies (if you read this blog there is a fair chance you do) check on eBay post 1 June -- Bukhara is apparently going to auction off the 3 tandoors they procured just for the popup.

Bukhara London Pop Up (until 1 June 2012)
1st floor,
Sheraton Park Tower
101 Knightsbridge
London SW1X 7RN
United Kingdom
+44 20 8045 0715

Bukhara
ITC Maurya
Diplomatic Enclave, Sardar Patel Marg
New Delhi 110 021 India
+91 11 2611 2233

London: Catalan Cooking's Grand Calcotada

Above: Rachel McCormack of Catalan Cooking, demonstrating the proper way to eat a calcot.

 

The one thing I've grown to love most about living in a seasonal part of the world is to celebrate foods at the peak of their season. By celebrate I mean eating said foods in grand obsessive festive fashion.

It's this seasonal celebration mentality (or mental something, at any rate) that caused me to buy and hand-squeeze kilo after kilo of blood oranges week after week in the late winter months. This mentality also recently caused me to spend some 9 hours shucking and gutting 120 scallops in our wee flat / home office. More of that madness in another post soon.

Thanks to Rachel of Catalan Cooking, calcots and calcotadas are now firmly on my calendar of festivals that I didn't grow up with, but will henceforth brazenly adopt because they taste so damn good.

Calcots are a delicate flavoured cross between a green onion and a leek, grown in the Catalan region of Spain. Earth is heaped up around the stems as they grow, to keep the stems white and tender. A calcotada is a big party where the community gathers to heap calcots on the grill, then peel off their scorched outer skin, then dip them in romesco sauce, then eat the sweet stalks in the most phallic way possible.

And then everyone eats a lot of meat.

What's not to like?

On this particular Thursday we gathered at The Drapers Arms in Angel to carry out this grand Catalan tradition, with calcots brought in from their spiritual home Valls. I ended up sitting next to a group of Spaniards, whom assured me that all the flavours, from the croquetas to the calcots to the romesco to the allioli, to the perfectly grilled chicken thighs and morcilla links and lamb chops were absolutely spot on. I believe them. As they ate, they had those slightly teary eyed smiles and little gasps of people who were getting homesickness assuaged after far too long.

 

 

The only hitch to the whole evening, they said, was that it wasn't on a Sunday and a booze-all-afternoon affair, which would be the case in Spain.

Ah well. Perhaps something to look forward to next year. Oh yes. Rachel is planning to host more calcotadas next year, and for many years after, I hope. Meantime, she's closing out this year's calcot season at Borough Market this Sunday (22 Apr). So get a taste if you can, and join me in marking your calendars for next Spring.

 

The Drapers Arms
44 Barnsbury Street
London, N1 1ER
United Kingdom
+44 20 7619 0348

 

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Edible Experiences. Unless otherwise stated, I attend events as a paying guest. Click the logo below for the latest events and classes by Catalan Cooking.

Young Turks at The Ten Bells

If you've been reading this blog for a while now, James Lowe and Isaac McHale of the Young Turks chefs collective in London are probably familiar names to you by now. For newer readers, welcome! The Young Turks consist of James (St Johns Bread and Wine; Fat Duck), Isaac (The Ledbury) and Ben Greeno (NOMA, Sat Bains) who is now cheffing at the Momofuku's Sydney-side venture Seiobo in Australia. I've been following the collective's adventures in fresh, local, fun and accessible cuisine in London for the past year -- see posts on a dinner by Ben; a dinner by James; their take on Burger Monday; a stint at The Loft Project; Canary Wharf and Frank's carpark / cafe in Peckham.

And so I was very happy to hear that the chaps secured a 3 month arrangement to serve dinners on the 1st floor dining room of The Ten Bells pub, a couple of doors down from James's old digs at Bread and Wine, and better known in decades past for being a watering hole for 2 of Jack the Ripper's victims.

The Young Turk £39 set menu dinners at The Ten Bells run from Tuesdays to Saturdays (a private room that sits up to 14 is also bookable), and James and Isaac have issued themselves the challenge to create a new 7-dish menu every week. Apparently one group (not me, I wish) that includes the manager of a red-hot London restaurant has already booked themselves a regular Friday table to ensure that they get to taste every damn one of these dishes.

Once you elbow your way to the back of the busy pub, past the door that says "No entry, toilets downstairs" and mince your way up the narrow staircase, the dining room is dark is decidedly distressed vintage chic-y meets London East End cheeky (the medium for at least 3 installations are in neon lights of lurid colours).

The chaps cook in the kitchen one floor up, but alongside their regular front-of-house collaborators The Clove Club, periodically bring dishes down themselves to make sure they have a good handle on the vibe in the dining room.

Hendricks gin is sponsoring the welcoming cocktail (a yummy combination of apple, damson and lots of spicy ginger), as well as an amusing "Etiquette for Gentlemen" booklet for boys to take with them at the end of the evening. These days I'm past the point of demanding why isn't there something for the ladies as well; I reckon this specific gift is being given where it's more needed!

And now to the food. First, an opening salvo of "snacks".

Snack 1: Pear and Middle White Ham. A lovely delicate twist on the more traditional prosciutto wrapped around melon. Utterly delicious. I'll have to attempt this at home soon! An interesting observation was made after dinner -- while ham and melon is a great flavour match, it's actually sometimes a texture mismatch, because the ham and melon break / tear off unevenly on the bite. Not so with this particular combination. Your thoughts?

 

 

Snack 2: Devilled Sprats. Babs really enjoyed this one, especially the dot of hot sauce on the head. Actually I didn't even realise there was hot sauce until I worked through my photos. I liked the texture of the fish, but I thought it could stand to be saltier and and spicier.

 

 

Snack 3: Pumpkin and Ogleshield Bun. Ogleshield is a kind of cheese, the very same kind used in the much loved Hawksmoor burger and Kappacasein raclette at Borough Market and Maltby St. These buns were cute, but personally I didn't feel the hit of cheese sufficiently.

 

 

Now onto the bigger dishes: Grilled Leek, Dried Scallop (I think this was Isaac's homemade XO sauce, which I first tasted at Frank's) and Seaweed. The purple seaweed was my favourite part of this dish. It was so fresh and had such a wonderful smell of the sea, we held our plates up to our noses for a few good inhalations before settling in.

 

 

Parsnip, Oats and Pheasant. A very comfort-food dish perfect for the weather outside, with a sophisticated dodge from the usual chicken or beef and potato. Parsnips make such pretty crisps!

 

 

Old Spot Belly, Molasses and Red Radish. I have to admit, when faffing with my camera over this dish, I muttered "I feel sorry for all these English people who keep attempting pork belly. They'll never do it as well as the Chinese." My dining companions (2 Chinese, 1 Indian) looked up, and countered, "Taste this one first."

The skin was so crispy, and the meat was so tender, but still I was a doubting Thomas. "D'you think they cook the skin and the meat separately?" Not likely -- I was shown where and how they were attached. Ok! Ok! I believe! Bravo, chaps. And by the way, my buddy Jas reckons the Young Turks could set up a stall selling nothing but strips of the crackling, and she would buy them all.

 

 

Dessert: Apples, Sour Cream and Apple Brandy. An absolutely delightful carb-free apple crumble of sorts. We also got treated to a bonus scoop of malty ice-cream later, but I figure you don't really need to see a mud-coloured scoop of ice-cream, do you? I can tell you that I managed to drop a dollop of it on my shirt, and I had a really hard time trying to decide whether I should wipe or lick it off given how yummy it was.

 

 

To close, slightly nipply tea cakes (with whiskey infused marshmallow, if I remember right), served with your choice of mint tea or Square Mile coffee.

 

 

Speaking of nipply... at this point one of my dining companions tips his chin, gesturing at something behind me, and asks "Is that them, then?"

I turn around, see this painting for the first time, and nearly fall off my chair laughing.

 

 

When the chefs came around to chat, it's down to me to ask. We're clearly on the verge of embarrasingly pubescent hysterics, and I'm asked if I've been drinking! (The worst thing is that I haven't, so I'm having to ask the question stone cold sober). A bit of resigned eye-rolling ensues. Apparently we're not the first to ask. Luckily the chaps have enough of a sense of humour, though let's see if I ever manage to get a table again in the time left on their stint...

All in all, I'm absolutely delighted that the Young Turks now have a slightly more permanent space of their own to hone and display their craft. This week's menu felt to me relatively safe, and for future visits I look forward the riding both the crests and troughs of their experiments. Read: anyone looking to have dinner with me in the next couple of months, don't be too surprised if I try to drag you off here. You can thank me later.

 

Young Turks at The Ten Bells
84 Commercial Street
London E1 6LY
United Kingdom

£39 for fixed menu and welcome cocktail; wines separate. Until 29 Jan 2012. Email reservations@tenbells.com

 

Beef Cartel at Maltby Street

 

Roundabout the start of August, there were these mysterious Twitter murmurings from young farmer / butcher / St John Bread and Wine chef Niall Davidson. Something about a 2-night beef themed pop-up at Gergovie Wines in the Maltby St enclave. The tweeting was fleeting, but there were so many keywords packed into those 140 characters for me that I felt like a colossal red neon sign had dive-bombed off the roof of a Las Vegas resort onto my head (or maybe my belly).

So I tap-danced on my keyboard, badgered Niall for more details, waited waited waited (turns out I can hold my breath longer than I think), arranged for a deposit, and counted down the remaining 22 days.

Meantime Niall waxed lyrical about the headline act. He was looking for a "mythical beast" raised for flavour rather than commercial yield. After much scouting he had sighted his divine bovine: A 3 1/2 year old heifer raised by Iain and Helen MacKay on the Isle of Mull, off the West Coast of Scotland. Raised on a couple of thousand acres of hills with native grasses free of synthetic fertilisers, and finished in the summer on a fertile strip rolling from the hills down to the beach. (Did the beast have a GPS tracking chip for the viewing I wonder...)

Bits of the 1 animal would be used over 2 evenings, with a mix of raw, offal and BBQ dishes.

Talk like that counts as erotic literature for some. And I suspect the rest of this post is going to end up reading a bit like a fetish event rather than a dinner. So watch out for your colleagues, kids and vegetarian friends, eh.

7 September. D-Day. We follow the intoxicating scent of white hot charcoal and rendering beef fat to a mini Argentinean-style parrilla outside Raef Hodgson's Wine Bar underneath the Maltby St railway arches. Once inside the cosy cave-like exposed brick environs, the display on the bar counter leaves no room for confusion about what the focus of the evening is going to be. I spot a few chefs, and a few more hurly burly men of the meat trade. No lace and feathers then. This is going to be hardcore.

 

 

And so we get right into it. Raw beef slivers, raw bone marrow, and deep fried potato. Niall deliberately served the beef as is -- he complains that in a traditional beef tartare all the capers and seasonings drown out the fundamental beef flavour. I get the point but I think I'd still prefer at least a generous sprinkle of sea salt flakes.

Raw bone marrow was a first for me, and tasted like a meaty unsalted butter. It's one thing to first roast the bones so that you can crack them and scoop and drip out the goopy marrow. It's quite another operation to crack raw bones to escavate the stuff, apparently.

The potatoes were a work of art. They look like deep fried pork lard cubes. But if I understand it right, they are paper-thin potato slices, compressed, cut up, and deep fried as little stacks...I'm going to guess in beef fat.

Obsession in the buff. This is what it looks like.

 

 

Next, a selection from the grill -- forerib, and shortrib (I prefer its sexier Spanish name, Asado de tira). So so so delicious in Argentina. So hard to find in London, for some mysterious reason. Around the table, eyes start rolling into the back of heads in pleasure.

 

 

Beef heart, slow cooked for 2 days then pan-fried. With tomatoes, pickled elderberries and a touch of fresh horseradish. A few other foodies might tell you that they found the evening to be awe inspiring or game changing. As much as I adore steak, for me this is the dish that raised the beef scene in London to a whole new level that night. The deep sweetness and flirty acidity of the tomatoes and elderberries were a fabulous yin to the the yang of the great muscle of beef. I ate this very slowly, just to try to prolong the moment for as long as I could.

 

 

Intermission. Niall pimps the beef a little more. He reckons nowadays beef either tastes creamy (raised and finished on cow-stomach-ulcer-inducing corn), or of not much at all (raised or finished on commercial silage). The beef we're having tonight, however, tastes probably like what beef tasted like 800 years ago -- its fat built up from the energy trapped in the grasses of high summer.

He may be hawking the stuff to a paying crowd, but geez, doesn't he look like a young man in love?

 

 

I wonder if I'd be allowed to attend future events if I start calling this new King of the Beef Fetish, Mr Hugh Heifer.

 

 

Back to the meat. I think this is a plate of shoulder, with a distinctly different (deeper, a bit muskier) flavour compared to the less-exercised rib cuts. The fat is incredibly flavourful. We eat it all, much to the disgust of one of our table companions who "doesn't eat much beef" but clearly loves her boyfriend enough to bring him to an evening such as this for his birthday.

 

 

I call this... the T-Boner. Nuff said.

 

 

There's also a little platter of diced up picanha (rump cap) that goes around the table like unholy communion. It went all too quickly, so no photo.

To finish, a lovely lemon sorbet from The Ice Cream Union, located a few arches down the stretch. I've peered at the wares by the 2 Argentinean brothers a couple of times enroute to a cheese toastie and raclette at Kappacasein, but haven't yet made a proper stop. I'll need to correct this this weekend, methinks!

 

 

The only "beef" we had about the evening was that portions were a bit too sensible. Possibly due a very bad habit of usually leaving a steak dinner over-full and clammy with the meat sweats, but a much loved habit nonetheless. We know this outcome is probably better for us. But still.

Other than that, all I can say is thank you to Niall, Raef and team for a divine bovine evening. Sounds like the pop-up format was a first for Niall, so it'll be interesting to see what he does next if anything. Perhaps you'll join me in trying to corralle him into doing more Beef Cartel events?

 

Beef Cartel at Maltby Street ran for 2 nights starting 7 September. Tickets were £45 each, inclusive of a glass of sparkling wine. Raef ran a cash wine bar alongside.

 

Gergovie Wines
40 Maltby St
London SE13PA
United Kingdom 

 

Click on the logo below to keep track of Beef Cartel's upcoming events.

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Edible Experiences. Unless otherwise mentioned, I attend events as a paying guest.

Young Turks Ocakbasi in Peckham

Above: Be still my beating (lamb's) heart...

 

Last night was another stellar night by Young Turks James Lowe and Isaac McHale and their front of house compatriots The Clove Club. This time, the lads took over Frank's Cafe and Campari Bar on the 10th floor of a parking lot in Peckham. Finding our way up to the roof was a slightly surreal Bladerunner-esque experience, complete with a gang of langourous bicycle-polo players silently weaving about on the 6th floor. I half wondered if they were yet another art installation, like the others scattered about the concrete space that smelled of both chlorine and pee.

The inspiration for cusine for the evening was old school Turkish ocakbasi / grill. The approach was decidedly Young Turks (go here, here and here and you'll get the idea); and the weather MOST decidedly old school British.

So the tarp was slightly leaky, and our bums were slightly damp, and apparently the chefs were going a bit bonkers because they only had 1 pair of tongs to share between them. But if you have a negroni or a rose sangria in hand, and folks like the madcap Lizzie, Euwen and Jessica to banter with, you'd be delightfully distracted as well.

And then there was the food.

Chefs James and Isaac are eager to start their own restaurants soon. And while I've been looking forward to that day for a while, last night was the first time I was consciously annoyed that these restaurants don't yet exist. C'mon, gents, hurry the hell up already. Where do I go to get a regular fix of this stuff?!

 

To start, soft, warm and flavourful rye bread with aubergine and smoked cod's roe purees. We were this close to nicking extra bread from latecomers' tables.

 

 

Cured pork fat and cobnuts. Just... stunning. Apparently there were a few fusspots health nuts seated nearby, who thought this dish was downright disgusting. We vultured their abandoned plate with delight. Thanks for the swipe-and-share Lizzie!

 

 

Buttermilk fried chicken thigh nuggets and pine salt. Our end of the table was missing 1 nugget, but when the extras came we were very tempted to chuck our bowl off the side of the building and claim that no nuggets had yet come at all.

 

 

Radishes with black sesame and gochujang (Korean hot pepper paste) mayonnaise. Be sure to eat the leaves et al!

 

 

Fennel, nasturtium, cucumber and mackeral dressing. Lovely, light and balanced.

 

 

Grilled onion, redcurrent and pickled elderberries. A Young Turks take on an old Turkish dish of onions with pomegranate molasses.

 

 

Not the best photo, but there was physical violence afoot if I didn't snap these chicken skin and mead skewers any faster!

 

 

I realise now I didn't manage to get a photo of the grilled leaks with XO sauce. I do remember they were damn tasty, though I think they could stand to be charred a bit more.

And now to the meats. Here's lamb's heart in flat bread, sheep's yoghurt and anchovy. It occured to me that up till now I'd only eaten chicken hearts. These sliced lamb hearts had a lovely spiced spongy bite. Gorgeous. Each of us got a section of roll. I would've been happy to eat a whole roll by myself!

 

 

BBQ pork belly, molasses and fennel blossom. Soft, silken, smoky, sweet, savoury. In between slow considered mouthfuls I looked bemusedly at one of my dining companions and confessed, "I'm sorry. I know you're saying something to me. But I can't actually hear anything you're saying."

 

 

And the much-discussed-during-the-week handmade grouse sausages, with damson and bread sauce. I'd never had grouse before, and over the last week various folks were poo-poohing it because of its gamey taste. As far as these sausages went, anyway, grouse to me tasted like pork. It can't be a bad thing for something to taste like pork, can it? I sure as heck could stand to eat more than 1 of these sausages at one go. I reckon it's time to try some grouse on the bone.

 

 

Dessert: Mulberry jelly (foraged from South London, so the gossip goes), raspberries and hazelnut mousse. Absolutely delightful. And quite colour coordinated with our red tarp and brown benches dining room for the evening. Thanks for being my hand model EuWen!

 

 

To finish, the traditional £2 round of Poire Williams being shopped around by The Clove Club's ever charming Daniel.

As always, a toast to the Young Turks and The Clove Clubs. I guess I'll have to skulk around the Turkish grills of Dalston and Stoke Newington until their next gig...

 

 

The Young Turks Ocakbasi at Frank's ends tonight (24 August) at £26 per person. Drinks are available at Frank's open cash-only bar. Stay tuned to the Young Turks and The Clove Club for updates on their next gigs ...

 

Click on the logo below to keep track of Young Turks' upcoming events.

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Edible Experiences. Unless otherwise mentioned, I attend events as a paying guest.

Young Turks and The Clove Club at Canary Wharf

 

This past weekend supperclub collaborators The Clove Club and the Young Turks opened the first week of the month-long Restaurants in Residence dinner party in a disused and soon to be demolished office building in the heart of Canary Wharf. The Clove Club + Young Turks dinners sit 80 diners a night, for £45 for a 4-course dinner. A cash bar is on site.

Service went for the most part so smoothly that you'd be hardpressed to guess straight off that the week leading up to opening night involved a herculean effort in setting up a kitchen from scratch. Complete with chefs fidgeting in vans in the loading bay of equipment companies waiting for insurance offices to open because having the insurance documents in hand was the only way to take delivery of equipment (breathe!); other equipment getting routed to the wrong location; cajoling farmers to deliver (sometimes the wrong) produce to Canary Wharf, and hauling a car full of organic apple wood to BBQ the beef dish of the evening on a little grill on a little terrace.

Hilarious (to me anyway) heart stopping madness. All for the love of food and a good time. And you wonder why I regularly try to drag my best foodie friends to these dinners. Well not that they need much dragging, which is why I love them!

After drinks on the terrace, a few bonus pre-starter starters:

Very sweet sugar snap peas, straight from the pod.

 

 

Cucumber spears with "Indian salt". I'm going to guess... salt, sugar, tumeric powder and crushed mustard seeds. Hopefully one of the chefs will correct me if needed! Such a subtle look, such a big revelation in taste.

 

 

Buttermilk fried chicken nuggets. Seriously, they could sell this spear by spear on street corners like vials of premium cocaine.

 

 

The first official starter: Tomatoes, goat's milk and wild marjoram. Incredibly pretty, and full of flavour unlike the anaemic, mealy varieties usually found in supermarkets. Hurrah for tomato season!

 

 

Lemon sole, wild fennel and elderflower, and mushrooms. Very simple and solid flavours, but hats off to doing 60 portions of fish in one evening in a makeshift kitchen!

 

 

Angus rib, grilled onions and land cress, with a celeriac and Kernel Brewery porter sauce. Gorgeous, especially with the very apparent smokiness of apple wood. Soooooooo goooooooood that fellow diner "Hollow Legs / The Incinerator" Jas later went to the kitchen the end of the evening and smiled her sweet sweet smile to try her luck and see if there were any leftovers!

Apparently the guest chef in charge of the beef dish was Dave Pynt, an alum of that Basque nirvana of fire and smoke that is Extebarri. I wonder what magic he would spin if given one of those supermarket disposable BBQs... Bet he could teach my Singapore supperclub running mate Goz a few tricks...

 

 

A brief interlude before dessert. We head back out onto the terrace for some photos in and of the sunset. Here are my beeyoootiful girlies!

 

 

I see the lads made a few calls to sort out the weather as well. Good work.

 

 

The dessert of loganberries, ewe's milk yoghurt and beremeal cake didn't evoke much of a reaction when read on the menu. Probably cos I'd never tasted any of the individual ingredients before.

But tasting it blew my head off. The loganberries from Kent had that fabulous but not sickly sweetness that can only come from the platonic ideal of what fruits at their prime taste like. The yoghurt was lovely and creamy but without that sometimes overpowering goaty smell of goat's milk. And the beremeal cake -- a ancient grain produced commercially only in the Scottish islands of Orkney where Chef Isaac McHale grew up -- provided great body to the dish.

What a stunner.

When saying hi to the team in the kitchen afterwards, and spying trays upon trays of the loganberries about, it took all my affection for them and even more willpower to not quickly organise a stickup and make off like a loganberry loony.

 

 

A last little dessert with coffee and tea: Sunflower praline ice-cream sandwiches in a (if I heard correctly) beremeal brioche. No photo unfortunately, as they were melting too fast due to a failed freezer! They looked like slider-size burgers, but sweet instead of savoury. Cute.

In summary, the food was at first glance simple and solid, but saw stellar execution with great spikes of extraordinary flavour due to great produce used. The service from The Clove Club gents was warm and personable as always. To nitpick, the team could've pushed the envelope a touch given the Canary Wharf location, with more creative names for the dining tables. Legal? The Boardroom? IT? Procurement? C'mon you guys, a bit "MEH", without any of the Ricky Gervais so-truthfully-banal-and-painful-it's-funny-but-I-can't-breathe-cos-it-hurts redemption.

How about naming the tables after spectacular financial crashes? How much cooler would it be to sit at a table named "South Sea Bubble" or "Black Monday" or "Ninja Home Loans" or even "Lehman" or "Bear Stearns"?

Like I said, a nitpick. Outside of that, thanks as always to the Young Turks and The Clove Club for a fabulous evening out.

The Clove Club + Young Turks dinner continues to run at Canary Wharf through all this week till 3 July. If interested, book your tickets here.

 

Click on the logo below to keep track of Young Turks' upcoming events.

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Edible Experiences. Unless otherwise mentioned, I attend events as a paying guest.

Dinner by Chef James Lowe

Above: Chef James Lowe searing mackeral

 

A couple of weekends back I had different groups of foodie friends visiting London at the same time. As part of taking my mates round to my favourite eats around the city, I asked Chef James Lowe if he would make an omakase (Chef's choice) dinner for 11 of us at £40 per person, on a BYOB basis. He graciously agreed. Sidenote: It's amazing how many time you can squeeze the world "pleeeeease" into an email.

James Lowe is an alum of The Fat Duck and was most recently the head chef at St John Bread and Wine. While hunting for his own restaurant site, he and The Ledbury development chef Isaac McHale have teamed up to form the Young Turks, cooking at supperclubs and pop ups around London (and soon abroad), with a commitment to small local producers, a fresh approach to British cooking and a spirit of collaboration rather than secrecy. On the side, James goes on quite a bit about his belief in good food at accessible prices. All philosophies I can get behind. But what of the food itself? After having attended their Burger Monday and Loft Project events, my gut is in full agreement with my head.

We started the evening with some baby veggies from Chegworth Valley. Babs is quite a fan of the airy anchovy cream foam dip. (Thanks to James also for foraging for the flowers. Nice rustic touch.)

 

 

Green strawberries, fried cheese bits, raw almonds and I think... rocket. Very light and green.

 

 

Tis the season to gorge on freshly picked sugarsnap peas. We'd been eating them all week around town any time we saw them on the menu. Here they're paired with wild pea shoots and flowers and ticklemore, a kind of goat's cheese. The wild pea here was possibly a bit too freshly foraged -- one of our diners found a live caterpillar amid the leaves (well the gorging season isn't just for humans, is it). It was hard to gauge the reaction at the table. One the one hand there were murmurings afterwards about why wasn't the plate immediately cleared. On the other hand, the diners (mostly Chinese) immediately started a surprisingly long conversation about what insects each of us had eaten, on purpose, while traveling in China. Also, these same diners were shockingly keen to nibble on some moss right off the surface of a tree that had been sawed off by a foraging chef dinner guest!

 

 

Next up: Cured mackeral, seared, with tomatoes. Simple, but yum.

 

 

The last 2 savory dishes were the superstars of the night. Here we have raw beef rib (look at that marbling!) made into a tartare with elderberry capers, wild watercress and oyster emulsion. Warning: it tends to be explosive on one's brains and senses when eaten for the first time.

 

 

But this next dish amazingly managed to outdo the last, and was my favourite dish of the evening. Very gently cooked wild sea trout, with sea beet and mussels in mussel muddle and broth. My friends and I were talking about this dish for days afterwards. The sea beet (also known as wild spinach) tasted like the essence of green and felt like silk. I need to get more. The mussels were really sweet and that sea trout! I'm still struggling to describe it. It looks like sashimi, but the oh so gentle cooking means that it has none of the stringiness or fibre of sashimi, but neither does it flake off in dry chunks of a larger fish. Incredibly delicate in the mouth, both in flavour and texture. Still not happy with this description, though. I need to eat this again and work on my words, clearly!

 

 

Finally, for dessert, goats curd ice-cream with luscious strawberries and powdered berries. A light twist to the very British strawberries and cream.

 

 

Many thanks are in order: To the chef for a lovely dinner, his delightful sous chef for the evening Rory Sheehan, on loan from James Knappett and Marcus Wareing (a young talent to watch, clearly!), and also my fabulous foodie friends, who were game to come along to a dinner where none of us knew what was going to be served beforehand.

If you're keen to taste James Lowe and Isaac Machale's work for yourself, the Young Turks and their front of house partners The Clove Club will be tearing up Canary Wharf for a week starting tomorrow (Saturday 25 June) as part of the month-long Restaurants in Residence pop up. Go!

Lunch by Chefs Janice Wong and Peter Gordon at #SGTakeout London

Above: Chef Janice Wong of 2am Dessert Bar in Singapore, and Chef Peter Gordon of The Providores and Kopapa in London

 

A couple of Fridays ago I was invited by the Singapore Tourism Board to attend a lunch cheffed by Janice Wong who runs 2am Dessert Bar in Singapore (previous writeups on her work here and here) and Peter Gordon who heads up The Providores and Kopapa in London.

They were the opening act for the Singapore Takeout global tour, where a shipping container refitted as a mobile show kitchen visits 9 cities over the span of a year, and chefs from Singapore (sometimes teaming up with an in-city chef) showcase dishes inspired by Singapore flavours. The lunch today was going to be mostly the same dishes being served to the public all weekend, but plated on actual plates rather than disposable Takeout takeout bowls. (See what I did there?)

I am generally sceptical about fusion food, taking quite seriously the advice that a Thai restauranteur once gave me, that "fusion food is confusion food". But sceptical is different from complete religious disbelief. Sometimes unexpected combinations produce delightful, cuisine-changing reactions and developments. So why deny oneself those opportunities? Food-mad folks, of all people, must live by the code that the proof is in the pudding, surely.

So here I was, on this rainy Friday lunctime, waiting for the chef demonstration to begin. Snacking on Janice's chilli chocolate coral mousse, apparently inspired by the old Mayan practice of combining cacao, honey and chili as medicine. Very pleasant indeed. I'm not a fan of super airy mousses. This one had sufficient structure and heft without being heavy. With of course that tinge of heat from the chilli.

 

 

For the demonstration, Janice and her sous chef Cathy demystify the process of "printing" onto edible parchments. If I remember right, it involves

• Printing words or a photo of choice with edible ink onto a transfer sheet (remember those iron-on t-shirt designs of the 80s?)
• Adding pectin to a flavoured puree of choice and then spreading it very thinly onto a silicone tray
• Putting on the transfer sheets, so that the heat from the puree will transfer the ink onto the sheet
• Letting things cool, scraping the sheets off the tray, then gingerly peeling off the transfer sheet

It's a cool party trick, and could be a fun wedding favour if you're into that kind of thing. Not really my style, even though it's probably the most painless way of eating one's words.

 

 

And now to lunch. Both chefs were going to do 3 courses each.

As a pre-appetiser, we get a taste of Janice's laksa mac & cheese. That is, your usual 4 cheese sauce, spiked with Prima laksa paste. My eyebrows jumped with scepticism, but once in the mouth, this totally worked. It was like a mini Singaporean David Chang moment.

 

 

Appetiser: Yu-sheng (raw fish) salad reimagined with tuna tartare, mandarin orange emulsion, and foraged herbs and flowers. Very light and fresh. For me it would never replace the traditional yu-sheng dish at Chinese New Year, an altogether more rustic, messy affair. But quite a fun off-season experiment.

 

 

Main: Laksa infused dumplings with noodles. Not very visible here, but the dumplings looked like the mini cat-ear variety. Very comforting on a rainy day. I could go for a big bowl of this.

 

 

Dessert: "Popcorn" with caramel, yuzu parfait and passionfruit sorbet. Popcorn with caramel totally works, obviously. Janice had said this was very much inspired by snacks in her youth, and I know exactly the one she means, having ingested way too much of it growing up myself. The light mellow acidity of the yuzu did a great job of balancing out the sweetness in the dish, but the too-tart passionfruit sorbet pushed it too gruffly over the edge. Has potential if it could be brought back from the brink. Why apologise for the fundamental taste of popcorn?

 

 

Petit fours: "Toffee pudding" made with gula melaka (palm sugar), squidged onto a dollop of kaya (coconut and egg jam) custard. The combination of sweet and sweet was too much for me personally. I'm trying to persuade my mate Goz who runs the London-based Singapore supperclub Plusixfive to do a different twist on this -- keeping the kaya custard, but subbing in a buttery, slightly bitter coffee cake. The tastes of a old school Singapore breakfast in one bite, essentially. We'll see how that goes, eh.

 

 

And now to Peter Gordon's showcase for the day.

Appetiser: A reimagined oyster omelette. This omelette was stuffed with crab meat, and garnished with mango sauce, deep fried shallots and coriander on top, with the oyster naked on the side. New Zealander Peter Gordon is said to have spent a respectable amount of time travelling around South East Asia, learning about its flavours through research and osmosis. This dish made me think, "yeah, this guy gets it". Possibly my favourite dish of the whole event, though involving crab and oyster gives it a very unfair advantage!

 

 

Main: Roasted pork belly cubes on steamed white rice with a pineapple sauce. Interesting in theory. But the pork belly was a little too dry, and there wasn't enough gravy on the rice to make up for that dry mouthful. Pleasant, but didn't get me in the gut.

 

 

Dessert: Almond milk with flaked almonds, strawberries and I lost track of what else. Peter Gordon's take on bo-bo cha-cha, so I heard. Not a dance from the 50s, but rather a Singapore dessert of diced sweet potato and yams and chewy tapioca flour shapes cooked in coconut milk. It was in a pretty glass, but this dish struck me as a prime example of fusion food being confusion food. There was just way too much going on. Plus (admittedly unfair) the very smell of almond milk or cream makes me retch, so I had to push this over to Goz right after the first mouthful.

 

 

Overall, the lunch was the fun result of a series of professional culinary experiments. Some dishes sparked lightbulbs that I reckon a few food bloggers including myself will want to go develop further in our own kitchens. Others were pretty "meh" and were best left in the slushpile. But that fun of finding out is the point, I reckon.

If you happen to be in Paris next week, Singapore Takeout hits the streets of gay Paree 30 June - 2 July at the Hippodrome Auteuil. The event will be cheffed by Andre Chiang of Restaurant Andre and Chef Sven Chartier from Restaurant Saturne. Stay updated via the Singapore Eats Facebook page and register here for the Paris tasting sessions!

Hanging Out with Team #SGTakeout London

Above: Singapore's 2am Dessert Bar chef owner Janice Wong, with her wooden tray of snacks

 

Feeding the 5,000 with 2 fish and 5 loaves of bread is a miracle. But cooking for a 1,000 in a foreign land where you don't have a familiar network of suppliers and kitchen, with only 2 of your trusted lieutenants from home, has got to count as a wee bit superhuman too, no?

A little context. My little food mad country Singapore has launched a Singapore Takeout campaign, which involves shipping a mobile kitchen container around the world over the next year. It stops for a few days in 9 cities, and a different chef from Singapore helms it in each city to showcase dishes inspired by Singapore flavours.

London Southbank is the first stop -- cos we be a bloody happening foodie city, innit -- and the chef in residence is Janice Wong, who owns and runs the very avant garde 2am Dessert Bar in Singapore's Holland Village. She and London guest star chef Peter Gordon (Providores, Kopapa) will be handing out free samples of fusiony dishes such as Lemongrass infused Laksa Dumplings with Noodles, Sweet Salty Popcorn Yuzu with Caramel, and Chilli Chocolate Corals with Homemade Peanut Butter and Honeycomb.

Through a lovely twist in foodie fate, I spent some time with Janice and her #SGTakeout team this week. Starting with a very serious shopping trip in Chinatown on the weekend. For quality control, Janice wanted to shop for as many of her ingredients herself. It was quite the amusing afternoon of 4 little Asian girls (ok except me, I'm not so little) hauling around crate upon crate of mandarin oranges, drums of cooking oil, and enough sacks of premium cocoa powder to give one a hernia. Some items simply had to be ordered in advance, however, so I didn't get to see what 20kg of lemongrass looks like. But a young chef from the South of France in the catering kitchen apparently did. For a whole 3 hours. As he stood there chopping them all.

A few days later I was signed up to be kitchen photographer (and inevitably an extra pair of kitchen hands) at a private dinner Janice was cheffing. It's a different menu from what will be served at #SG Takeout this weekend, but I thought it'd be a good opportunity to give you some indication of the creativity, discipline and care that goes into Janice's work. (Word on the street was that she dumped 15 litres of coconut milk this week, because she didn't deem the quality of it good enough for you good folks). Hopefully it'll entice you to drop by the Singapore Takeout container on Southbank today (Friday 10 June) or tomorrow to try her food and maybe sneak a peek at her chef demonstration. More details at the end of the post.

 

Detail on the plank of snacks: White chocolate pretzels, compressed watermelon with blue cheese cream, shards of dried mango and dressed up crackers sit on a garden of edible (chesnut and chocolate) soil.

 

 

The Garden "Yu Sheng": Janice's take on a raw fish salad traditionally eaten during Chinese New Year. The herbs are largely foraged from the beaches of Copenhagen, as Janice spent a week with the NOMA lab and foraging team just before coming to London.

 

 

Curry Chicken: Chinese "lap cheong", fragrant rice. My key source of amusement from this dish was that I never thought I would ever see chicken curry being plated with tweezers.

 

 

Beef: A perfectly seasoned and cooked steak with mushroom veloute, bok choy, 2 flavours of potato, and a smudge of (wait for it) salted egg custard. There was also a slowcooked strawberry in the mix. I didn't try it with the steak but it sure tasted amazing when Janice shoved one in my mouth!

 

 

Blood orange snowball: With lemon curd, mandarin orange and laced with condensed milk.

 

 

Basil white chocolate: With textures of passionfruit. I dunno how the hell she did it, but she got her favourite poem by Thoreau imprinted on little basil and passionfruit parchments.

 

 

Chocolate Coral: With textures of caramel.

 

 

And petit fours to go with coffee and tea: Chocolate and peanut butter pops; and toffee cake with kaya custard.

 

 

Intrigued? Want to see more?

 

 

Head down to London’s South Bank, The Riverside Walkway (by Gabriel’s Wharf), South Bank, London SE1 9PP

Public Tastings:
Friday 10 June 2011: 5.30pm – 7.45pm
Saturday 11 June 2011: 12.15pm – 3pm, or 5.30pm to 7.45pm

Admission is FREE, with 2 complimentary sample dishes from the menu.

For more updates on the Singapore Takeout event, follow @YourSingaporeUK on Twitter for the London leg, and also the Singapore Eats Facebook Page. For those not in London, here are dates for when Singapore Takeout hits Delhi, Dubai, Hong Kong, Moscow, New York, Paris, Shanghai and Sydney.

 

Above: Janice at the Singapore launch of Singapore Takeout back in April. See you there, dumpling!

London: Young Turks At The Loft

 

If you have not yet heard of the Young Turks -- James Lowe (St Johns Bread and Wine; Fat Duck), Isaac McHale (The Ledbury; Tom Aikens), and Ben Greeno (Momofuko; Noma; Sat Bains) -- you have now. And if you do some news trawling, you will probably hear that they are London's next big dining scene thing.

I see your "flavour of next month", and I raise you a "They're going to rock British food to the next level". My bet is that they're going to do so by calling a few bluffs many of us London diners have until now put up with:

• A fabulous meal has to cost a fortune
• A chef needs a few secrets and be an asshole to get ahead
• Customers want what they want, when they want, and will never trust the chef to choose for them

It's early in the game for them still, so any skepticism out there is understandable. But having now tasted 2 of their collaborative events (my first being their opening Burger Monday act for Young and Foodish) and tried grub ala Greeno, I've decided that I'd rather be wrong betting on these lads than be wrong not betting on them.

My 2nd Young Turks evening was last week at The Loft Project run by Viajante chef Nuno Mendes. The supper club space to end all supper club spaces in Dalston hosts a rotation of up and coming chefs.

 

 

This past week the Young Turks were in da house with a £60 six course tasting menu with wine pairing, with front of house being supported by their mates Dan and Chris.

 

 

The boys were also supported in the kitchen by comrades looking for plating practice.

A rather softspoken but smiley Nicholas painstakingly sculpts us some canapes:

 

 

Gem lettuce, curd and anchovy. A mouthful of creamy uber savouriness, kept refreshing by its crispy green canvas.

 

 

Smoked cod's roe, oats and kohlrabi. You've heard of jumbo rolled oats, yes? These ones were rolled into cardboard-thick sheet crisps. The cod roe had been moussed, and the kohlrabi was evidently diced by elves.

 

 

And now, if you'll indulge me, a triptych tribute to fat. Middle white fat and cured lop. Home-cured by James Lowe, for... 3 months? 4 months? 14 months? Did I hear right? The number kept climbing. Some people have wine cellars. I'm starting to think he's got a fat cellar, with an array of lardy vintages.

 

 

Drink pairings for the evening (or at least the wines) were paired by Jade Koch of HG Wines. The evening opened with a delightful rhubarb prosecco fizz.

 

 

A luxuriant runny-yolked duck egg, with snails and ramson (aka wild garlic). I've loved eating snails since I was a kid but I'd never had them in an English cuisine setting until now. The French usually drown them in a very garlicky butter, so I thought using wild garlic here was a very clever and refined riff. And especially entertaining because the liquidised wild garlic looked like the snail's slime trail. What are little boys made of, eh.

Wine pairing: A 2010 Chateau de Roquefort "Petit Sale".

 

 

There is a lovely bit in a recent interview of James Lowe by Eating East where he says he got to a certain point of his career at St John Bread and Wine where nose-to-tail boss Fergus Henderson felt some of his dishes were getting "a bit racy" -- a prompt for James that it was time to strike out on his own and make a push for his own style.

I am convinced that the raw beef rib with oyster mousse and chickweed is one of those "racy" dishes.

 

 

I mean, bloody hell, raw beef and oysters? It already sounds like sex on a plate.

And then you taste it.

 

 

And then it's worth clarifying that by sex on a plate I mean the rough, messy kind, with a backstory full of exquisite tension, twists and turns, where the walk of shame the next morning a very heady cocktail of afterglow and a mild gnawing guilt and a half conscious smirk at the surreal-ness of it all.

The dish made me blush, is what I'm saying.

And now it might make James blush too.

I realise all conversations with James from now on may be a bit awkward. I'll risk it, as long as I get the message across that he needs to keep making this dish, at his future gigs and in his future eventually world famous restaurant. Because I reckon all the world could do with this endorphin rush. Possibly even the vegetarians and vegans. No? Oh all right. I respect your principles. More for me then.

Wine pairing: A 2008 Vignobles Guillaume Pinot Noir

****

Here's Isaac prepping some very beautiful beetroot, to be combined with goats milk granita and pickled elderberries.

 

 

The end result was subtle, beautiful and delicate, a wonderful yin to the raw beef and oyster's yang. Why can't vegetarian restaurants put forward more dishes like that, celebrating the vegetable, rather than forcing the vegetable into the mould of a meat substitute that will never meet the mark?

Wine pairing: A 2009 Domaine Gerard Metz "Eldelzwicker".

 

 

Next up, another dish that sounded great on paper and tasted even better in real life: Jersey Royal potatoes, with monks beard and crab.

 

 

The intense sweet-saltiness of the sea in the crab, the slightly crunchy seaweed and the bisque damn near knocked me off my chair. I'm not usually the biggest fan of potatoes, but here it was an integral part of... not a deconstructed, but rather, a yet-to-be-constructed chowder for the gods. It was lick-the-bowl-clean good. I've long loved seaweeds of different kinds in Japanese and Chinese cuisine, and absolutely loved the taste of same-day harvested seaweed in Zanzibar, so I'm really hoping the guys find more ways to incorporate fresh seaweed into future dishes.

Wine pairing: A 2010 Pierre Cros Minervois Blanc

 

The last dish before dessert was "Chicken, rye, hop shoots and green onions". Except for the roast chicken leg at Le Cafe Anglais, I never order the chicken dish in a Western restaurant, because it's almost always an unimaginative, horribly bland, over dry breast.

Even at home, even when we buy properly raised chickeny-tasting chickens from the farmers markets, I usually end up shredding and salting the breast meat to bulk up a brothy soup, rather than eat it on its own.

But tonight The Young Turks reclaimed chicken breast and put it on back on the high cuisine map. It was moist and had a beautiful flavour, served with a very unusual but oddly comforting rye porridge studded with carrots, mushrooms and other savoury bits.

There was debate about whether there were too many things going on with this dish. Mostly I think there was too much talking going on while I was trying to focus on making this dish last longer.

Wine pairing: A 2010 Domaine Boudau "Le Clos"

 

 

We couldn't quite identify the hop shoots in the dish, and most of us had never seen it before in its original form, so Isaac brought out their ziploc stash and we all had a good ol' inhale. It was spring on a string.

 

 

For dessert: chocolate malt ice-cream and cascara jelly. Cascara is the dried skin and pulp from the coffee berry, and tastes curiously like tea. Again, there was some debate about the appropriateness of pairing jelly and ice-cream. I've now been educated that it's a traditional dessert pairing from many British childhoods. *Shrug* I didn't grow up here, so it's lost on me I think. Personally I don't like mixing my ice-creams with much. Malt makes the short list. Jelly does not.

 

 

I forget the details of what went into the biscuits that went with coffee and tea, but I think it involved oats, orange and thyme?

 

 

I'll close out with a toast (of Imperial Brown Stout from my very own neighbourhood Kernel Brewery).

 

 

To the Young Turks and their bitchin kitchen team, thank you for an utterly fabulous night. It's a real delight to be part of this very early phase of your grand adventure. Yes I trust there is so much more to come, and that it will be grand and then some.

To Dan and Chris, thank you for taking such good care of us and I look forward to coming to one of your gigs soon.

It's always worth saying -- thanks to all of you for being so patient with me and my camera getting underfoot!

Finally to the many sparks in the room -- Momma McHale, Simon, Shanaz, Xiaohan, Frieda, Miguel, Jade of Bocca di Lupo and Chef Rachel of Spuntino, it was lovely to meet you / break bread with you. I look forward to seeing you all again soon!

 

Click on the logo below to keep track of Young Turks' upcoming events.

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Edible Experiences. Unless otherwise mentioned, I attend events as a paying guest.

London: Burger Monday with Young & Foodish and The Young Turks

Say ahhhhh.....

 

It's Monday. But instead of the Monday blues, on this particular evening I'm wired with a Monday buzz. Because me and mah homies are at our first Burger Monday.

Well. Just a wee representation of my homies. Mostly because the ridiculously popular event sold faster than I could fight through the excruciatingly frustrating Paypal interface to book my spots.

Breathe. Happy thoughts. Hamburger thoughts.

Burger Monday is an eat and meet party, hosted by Daniel Young of Young and Foodish. As I understand it, he usually organises a sizeable reservation at the best burger and pizza establishments in London, and sometimes New York. His guests / customers enjoy the fruits of his foodie research, and maybe make a few friends in the process.

This year he's tweaking his format -- bringing top chefs and purveyors to a laid back location, to test the gourmet limits of these well known and well loved fast food items.

Starting with a bang, last Monday (24 Jan) his line up at Andrews Restaurant on Grays Inn Road consisted of The Young Turks: Ben Greeno (Tudor Road; alum of NOMA and Sat Bains); James Lowe (St Johns Bread and Wine; alum of Fat Duck); and Isaac McHale (alum of The Ledbury and Tom Aikens). Supplying the beef for the evening -- a private reserve blend of 100% Perthshire Black Angus -- was Darragh O'Shea of O'Shea's Butchers.

 

 

The diner is buzzing when we get there, and it's not from the flourescent lights!

 

 

The effervescent Mr Young is the one in the red shirt. As you can see from the abundance of cameras pointed at food, I am in good food geek company for the evening.

 

 

Here's Ben Greeno plating up the starter: "Lox on Toast" -- house-cured salmon, pumpernickel bread, pickled kohlrabi and a smudge of horseradishy mousse.

 

 

I'm a confessed fan of Ben Greeno's raw mackeral starter, and am delighted that I can now add salmon to that list.

 

 

Maybe it's just me, but the proximity of Marmite and candy bars somehow just brought the elegance of the finished lox dish into sharper focus.

 

 

Given there were 4 generous slices, I ate 2 slices sashimi style and with the other 2 made myself a little open-face sandwich.

Note to self: Get more kohlrabi onto the dinner table. I'd first started eating these in earnest while in Bangalore and then Hanoi last year, and missed them after Babs and I left Asia. But given kohlrabi means "German turnip", they've got to be findable not too far from London, no?

 

 

At this point I would like to officially say a big thank you to the event's waitstaff. Whom despite very cosy quarters and very hungry diners and very heavy plates were infinitely patient with me while I got underfoot around the counter, trying to get some kitchen action shots.

 

 

Here's James Lowe salting the burgers and manning the grill. I'm guessing he used coarse salt while shaping the patties as well -- they had brilliant little pockets of extra savouriness, which had me puzzling for a few minutes about whether they had added bone marrow or minced bacon into the blend.

 

 

Dress with lettuce, onion shavings, a very light ketchup, mayo and homemade pickles, and hold together with a pillowy toasted bap.

I love it that the burger can barely fit in the frame.

 

 

If I've observed right, the burgers are grilled to just under medium rare, then the ogleshield cheese is slapped on, the the cheesed up patties are put in the oven for some top-down melty-magic heat. Clever. Combining melty cheese and a still medium rare burger is always a bit tricky for me if I'm grilling outside. If the heat has worked its way upwards through the patty to melt the cheese, it usually means it's not as pink as I would like inside. Some burger purists might consider using an indoor oven cheating, but hell! Melty ogleshield on a pretty pink patty is definitely a case of the ends justifying the means.

Put it all together and it's a gorgeous and soon very primal messy work of art.

 

 

And the fries! I didn't get a good photo of them, but they were very golden and very crispy. Triplecooked in beef fat, I'm guessing?

The dessert for the evening is "hot chocolate sundae" -- affrogato al cioccolato. If Mickey D's hot fudge sundae had a posh boarding school plum-in-the-mouth cousin, I think this would be it. Its sweet notes are much more smooth and subtle. The garish chemical sugars of the fast food rendition tastes like how Mimi from the Drew Carey show looks, by comparison.

 

 

I'm really regretting now not holding back a few fries to dip into the the ice-cream -- the way i used to eat them at Mickey D's as a teenager. Don't knock it till you try it!

To summarise, all 3 dishes and the wine (a 2009 Santa Cristina from Tuscany) were soooooooperb. I am immensely curious to see how Daniel Young and his future collaborators are going to top this burger.

If there's anything that would take the evening to the next level for me, however, it would be to do a milkshake pairing with the burger (very much missed this evening). There's no reason these milkshakes have to be PG-version only, mind you. I'd love for some young pastry chef genius to come up with alternatives to a very memorable Jack Daniels & peanut butter milkshake from Cape Town's Royale Eatery.

Last but not least, a bonus to the delicious evening was to finally meet and chat with a few London food bloggers I'd been reading for some time. Dino of The Epicurean, Eu Wen of A Rather Unusual Chinaman, Niamh of Eat Like a Girl, Chris of Cheese and Biscuits, twas a real pleasure, and I hope to see you all again soon!

See Young and Foodish for future events. And thank you for putting together such a fun evening!
This particular Burger Monday cost £35 per head, at

Andrews
160 Grays Inn Road
London WC1X 8ED
United Kingdom

 

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Edible Experiences. Unless otherwise stated, I attend events as a paying guest.

London: Catalan Cooking's Casa de Pages Pop Up

 

Imagine a village on the northern coast of Spain. Picture a hundred ruddy-faced, rough handed peasants who usually spend their days in the fields, in their metal workshops, in their carpentry sheds. (Move the clocks back a century or two if it helps the visuals.) Tonight they gather in the village hall. Tomorrow they go back to their labour and toil, but tonight, tonight they will feast, they will drink, they will dance, they will laugh, and they will feast some more and then some more still.

Rachel McCormack of Catalan Cooking and Franz Schinagl (ex head chef of Asia de Cuba) have spent the day cooking enough food to feed all of them, with a little more for them to bring home.

Except there aren't a hundred villagers. There's just 18 of us curious city slicker eaters, tucked into the various charming nooks of Beas of Bloomsbury in London this Saturday past.

With no idea about the variety and scale of food that's about to wallop us at this debut Catalan pop up dinner.

 

 

Rachel is a native of Scotland, but spent much of her 20s living, working and evidently eating and cooking in Barcelona. She's now a maven of Spanish cuisine and produce in London, and runs a schedule of Catalan homestyle cooking classes at Beas. I have ambitions of attending one of those classes this year, but in the meantime, jumped at the opportunity to taste her cooking beforehand.

We begin the evening with manchego cheese, olives and fuet, a Catalan-style cured chorizo. It's flavoured with pepper rather than paprika or garlic, and so its taste is much more subtle than its Castillian cousins. The lovely manchego is rosemary covered, brought in by Flavours of Spain.

Rachel paired this course with La Pamelita, apparently Spain's only sparkling red wine, made by Pamela Geddes, another Scot who lost her heart to Catalonia. It was refreshing with just a tinge of sweetness that didn't descend into cloying. I could stand to drink a lot of this. And I think we did!

 

 

Here's the very fiesty Rachel serving what turned out to be my favourite course of the evening: Sopa de Carn D'olla, or the stock from all meats. Apparently just about everything that was cooked that day had a long baptism in this stuff. It looks like a light consomme, but it's got the hefty flavour of Bovril, a treacly essence-of-beef from my childhood that invokes memories of (who knows why) shuffling around indulgently in pyjamas on a rainy day. This is stuff to mend the soul. Especially with a drop of wine. This particular one was the Raimat Abadia 2007 from Lleida. Great with soup, also very enjoyable straight up.

 

 

The hot mains were served buffet style at the cafe's small front counter. Which proved to be my personal undoing because each time I'd come back to my table with a sensibly full plate, I'd realise that yet another slew of dishes were just making their way out. So of course back to the counter I would go. My dining companions just about had to wheelbarrow me out of Beas after dinner, I was so full! In fact even after a very raucuous karaoke session which lasted till 3am afterward, I woke up at noon on Sunday STILL FULL! How many times has this happened in the past after a large buffet meal? ZERO.

So, Rachel and all the Catalan villagers on whose shoulders you stand, I salute you.

But back to the food. The arroz al forn amb bolets -- rice cooked (in the all-meat stock and some tomato sauce) in the oven with wild mushrooms, holds tons of potential, but was a touch too al dente for my taste. Just a splash more stock and another 10 minutes in the oven, for me personally. The dish seemed plenty popular with the other diners though.

The Tarragona-style hake was absolutely gorgeous -- its firm white flesh standing up well to the romesco sauce. A friend of mine whose parents have a house in this corner of Spain spent a recent dinner with me raving about the hake there. It might be time to see if his parents are maybe looking to adopt.

 

 

Here's Franz cracking open the seabass cooked in salt (above).

The best rendition of this dish I've ever had was at the now-defunct Korfez in Istanbul. Saturday night's version was pleasant, but Korfez still holds the title for me. Specifically, the seabass flesh at Korfez was much firmer. Whether one fish was fresher than the other, or whether one was wild (firmer) while the other was farmed (softer and a touch powdery), or whether one was somehow affected by the cooking method, I'm not sure.

Have you met my darling girl kopibren? This is kopibren (below) right after Rachel's told us that the next course to come is pig trotters. If there is any group of people who love the more awkward bits of a pig more than the Spaniards, it's gotta be the Chinese.

And there they are, cooked... in the pot along with everything else I guess ... just one of the many off-menu bonus dishes that night.

 

 

 

The trotters trot out fond memories of my Dad's side of the clan, who roundabout this time of year chow down on many of these, braised in dark soya sauce and chili and garlic. I also find myself thinking fondly of my friend Su Lynn's Mom, Aunty Lisa. I remember studying for my A-levels in her house while trotters were being slowcooked in black vinegar in her kitchen. The fragrance was utterly intoxicating.

Here's the meat course: (from left) Black and white pudding; simply cooked and flavoured chicken, and lamb (the last of which could have done with some spicing I think).

 

 

On the side were 2 kinds of aioli -- regular, and apple. The lighter, fruitier applie aioli was amazing with the chicken and the giant pork-and-beef meatballs below.

It seems Rachel went easy on us on the meatballs -- she says they're sometimes the size of footballs!

 

 

And now on to desserts. I wonder if the bunyols -- donuts -- are usually football sized as well. Even though these were quite petite, and ludicruously scrummy with their various lacings of lemon, amaretto and gin(!), by this time I was so full I could only nibble on these donuts for a taste.

 

 

I lied. I did find a way to finish my sopa d'avellanes amb el seu cruixent (hazelnut soup with hazelnut crocanti and ice-cream). Trust me, you would too.

And finally here's Melf looking sheepish because by now we're all in gluttonous pain but we STILL can't say no to turron (kinda like hazelnut-based compressed paste, as far as I can tell) served with coffee.

 

 

For £35 for the food and an extra £10 for the wine, I am completely bowled over by the sheer generosity of Rachel, Franz and Bea. If the blitz had restarted outside that night, I think we could have stayed holed up and fat and happy for about a week before we even noticed.

But given that it didn't, I wonder if this is one of those rare moments where there was indeed too much of a good thing -- we were fighting to just keep up with the food, and I felt like my attention was too scattered to really give each dish the attention it deserved.

It'll be interesting to see how the approach evolves for next time. Or at least, I'm hoping there's a next time. Rachel's tantalised me before with cooking paella in a wheelbarrow when the weather gets warmer. I'm definitely going to hold her to it. And I'm telling you so you can help me nudge her too!

Catalan Cooking pop up dinner at
Beas of Bloomsbury
44 Theobald Road
London WC1X 8NW
United Kingdom
+44 207 242 8330

 

Click on the logo below to keep track of Catalan Cooking's upcoming events.

Disclosure: I'm the founder of Edible Experiences. Unless otherwise stated I attend events as a paying guest.